Posts Tagged ‘Dingell’

As we speak, in terms of the national average price for gasoline, it will cost you about seventy bucks to fill a 20 gallon tank.

And in the People’s Republic of California – which taxes the hell out of gasoline just like they’re taxing the hell out of everything else – it’s actually a fair amount worse. Just in case you needed more proof that Democrats and sky-high gasoline prices lovingly walk hand-in-hand.

When George Bush was president – even though Democrats were in control of both the House and the Senate – high gas prices were “Bush’s fault.” It happened during his watch, and that was all the Democrats and their mainstream media intellectual soulmates needed. And of course it doesn’t matter how lousy things are under Obama’s watch, because the Bush presidency is like the original sin to liberals; it extends backward and forward into eternity, so that all things evil can be attributed to it. Basically that is because government is Democrat’s god, and Bush was a heretic who defiled the only god with whom they have to do.

It didn’t matter that polls showed that Americans overwhelmingly were on the Republicans’ side when they said, “Drill baby, drill.”

“The one thing we fail to talk about is those costs that you don’t see on the bottom line. That is coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick; it’s global warming. It’s ruining our country, it’s ruining our world. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.”

“So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

And the result of shutting down plants that produce half our electricity in Obama’s own words:

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.”

OBAMA: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that, ehh, this is such a shock t’American pocketbooks is not a good thing. Uh, but if we take some steps right now t’, uh, help people make the adjustment — first of all by putting more money into their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more quickly, particularly US automakers.

What Obama would have said if he wasn’t a total idiot and a disgrace to the presidency is, “Of COURSE high gas prices won’t hurt us! That would kill our economy! Just what kind of idiot are you for even asking?!?!?”

Obama didn’t say that because he thinks high gas prices actually will help America. That’s just the kind of incompetent disgrace to the American presidency that he is.

Fossil fuels are bad. Using fossil fuels are bad. Inexpensive energy is bad (at least as long as the price doesn’t rise too soon at any one time and make Americans react like frogs placed in boiling water) because it encourages Americans to keep using cheap energy when they should be using the expensive and inefficient energy sources that Democrats want to force them to use. Which means being able to afford driving to work or heating your home is bad.

Nancy Pelosi’s failed policy, Harry Reid’s failed policy and Barack Obama’s failed policy are off-limits in the media, however. You really don’t hear any stories on that stuff. Our media “gatekeepers” have slammed the gates shut on that angle.

Last year – and that was before the crisis in Libya and before the “evil” Republicans took over the House of Representatives after two years of abject Obama failure to govern, I pointed out that gasoline prices had actually skyrocketed on Obama’s watch. And dang oh boy hooeeeh they’ve skyrocketed since. Which is to say that the fact of the matter is that the crisis in Libya or in the Middle East really doesn’t have anything to do with this. It’s the fool we had in office a year ago when prices were skyrocketing who is the same fool we’ve got now that is the “crisis.”

These people are getting exactly what they want. And by “exactly what they want,” I mean the destruction of the American economy so a purely socialist system can be erected in the ashes.

Obama and his handpicked energy secretary are getting exactly what they want, and exactly what Obama said he would do if elected. The same Democrats who demonically demonized Bush for high oil prices have all along wanted the price of oil to “necessarily skyrocket” so that automakers will be forced to manufacture little clown cars and the American people will be forced to buy those clown cars.

They want to say, “Oil is too expensive and too unstable.” We’ve got to spend hunderds and hundreds of billions on an utterly stupid agenda such as high speed rail, solar panels, wind, etcetera. And we’ve ultimately got to take cars and the freedom that comes with mobility away from the people so that we can better control and shape them into what we want them to be.

“The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

We’ve got them in their own words. We’ve got them telling us that they WANT high gas prices and expensive energy. We’ve got them doing everything they can to prevent any and all American drilling.

And yet Democrats agreed with this agenda and voted for these people and put them into power.

Democrats want seven dollar a gallon and higher gasoline prices? Why not let them have it right now. Isn’t that only appropriate?

And with national gasoline prices at the halfway point, it seems like the perfect solution:

EVERY SINGLE TIME A DEMOCRAT FILLS HIS OR HER TANK, THEY SHOULD FILL A REPUBLICAN’S TANK AT THEIR EXPENSE.

It’s a win-win. Republicans get the inexpensive oil they want to fuel their cars and businesses, and Democrats get to go the way of the Dodo bird all the faster – which is exactly what they want for the rest of America. And by extension, every single Democrat should pay the highest tax rates on every single Obama tax hikes. They want it for others; let them pay it themselves.

So tell you what, Democrats. And I mean every single one of you. Fill our tanks, which will bring your costs to the minimum price of what Obama’s handpicked energy secretary said was “the goal.”

Or just shut the hell up and get the hell out of our lives, you hypocrites.

Justice Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court in Pensacola ruled today that the primary mechanism used by the health reform legislation to achieve universal insurance coverage–the individual mandate–is illegal. If his ruling stands it would void the 2,700 page, $938 billion health reform bill passed last year.

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications,” Vinson writes.

With this ruling, and a similar one in December by Judge Henry Hudson in Virginia, it’s likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will be the final arbiter of whether ObamaCare stands. Two other lawsuits–one in Michigan and one in Virginia–were thrown out by other federal district judges last year who ruled the constitutional challenge lacked merit.

Most analysts were expecting a ruling in favor of the 26 states hoping to overturn the bill. Vinson, in an earlier ruling, suggested that the federal fine for not buying insurance is more of a penalty than a tax. If it’s a penalty, the legislation relies on a broad interpretation of federal regulatory powers. If it’s a tax, as the Department of Justice’s lawyers argued, it’s much more difficult to make a constitutional objection.

In today’s ruling Vinson considered two arguments made by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, the lead plaintiff on the lawsuit. The first was the legislation forces states to expand Medicaid in a way that’s unaffordable. Vinson quickly dispatches that legal theory, pointing out that Medicaid is and always has been a voluntary program.

The second argument revolves around the individual mandate. The health reform legislation makes it illegal for insurers to discriminate against patients regardless of their health. With that change there’s a risk that only sick people would buy insurance and healthy people would wait or be priced out of the market. To address that problem, the bill forces everyone who does not have insurance to buy it. The combination of “guaranteed issue” and the “individual mandate” is the beating heart of the health bill.

While the new rules banning medical underwriting are popular, the individual mandate has bred resentment. The bill’s authors never anticipated the mandate would become a ripe target for legal challenges.

The argument that’s had the most traction is based on the limitations of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The Commerce Clause explicitly allows the federal government regulate interstate commerce. But it also has been used to justify federal laws that affect other kinds of economic activity. The question raised by the lawsuit against the health reform bill is whether refusing to buy insurance constitutes interstate commerce. In his ruling Vinson says that in the past the Commerce Clause has been used to regulate activities like growing marijuana or navigating a waterway, but not used to force someone to do something they weren’t already doing. “It would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause,” he writes.

Vinson rejects the administration’s argument that the health care market is unique since nobody can truly opt out–and that not buying insurance is in itself an economic activity since the cost of care then falls on others. Vinson mocks this argument, writing: “Everyone must participate in the food market… under this logic, Congress could [mandate] that every adult purchase and consume wheat bread daily.” If they didn’t buy wheat bread they might have a bad diet which would put a strain on the health care system, he writes.

Later he offers another analogy: “Congress could require that everyone above a certain income threshold buy a General Motors automobile — now partially government-owned — because those who do not buy GM cars (or those who buy foreign cars) are adversely impacting commerce and a taxpayer-subsidized business.” Vinson concludes: “The individual mandate exceeds Congress’ commerce power, as it is understood, defined, and applied in the existing Supreme Court case law.”

Judge Vinson marshalled quite a few opinions against ObamaCare. Interestingly, one of them was Obama’s himself.

In ruling against President Obama‘s health care law, federal Judge Roger Vinson used Mr. Obama‘s own position from the 2008 campaign against him, arguing that there are other ways to tackle health care short of requiring every American to purchase insurance.

“I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of the 78-page ruling Monday.

Democrats have established quite a recent history in thumbing their noses at the Constitution.

Charles Krauthammer had this to say on Fox News Special Report on January 5th about Democrats literally boycotting the reading of the Constitution on the House floor:

KRAUTHAMMER: “It is truly astonishing. One member of Congress called it a long, dull document. The New York Times editorial reading of the Constitution in the House is presumptuous. Liberals got in trouble in the 60s and 70s for being on the wrong side of the flag and the anti-war demonstrations and now three decades later, they want to be on the wrong side of the Constitution.

The Constitution, after all – when these members were sworn in today, that they did not swear to defend the country or the army or the people; it was to defend the Constitution. That is the essence of America, and it is what makes us unique and why we are a country not of blood or race but ideas. For liberals to think that there is actually an advantage in dismissing reading the Constitution and the requirement of having a constitutional reason to introduce a bill is real bad politics.”

It wasn’t just “bad politics.” Krauthammer underscored that better than anyone. It was contemptible citizenship. It was the act of unAmerican people.

It is beyond official at this point. We can separate the population of the United States of America into two groups: the American people and the unAmerican people. And the Democrat Party has become the party of the unAmericans.

UnAmericans don’t give a damn about America. They want to change it, pervert it, warp it, distort it. They want to make it into something that it never was and never should have been. And they call their effort “hope and change.”

Mind you, that’s “hope and change” in the direction set by Karl Marx; never the one set by George Washington.

Let’s take another bus tour to how we got ObamaCare shoved down our throat:

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rep. Nancy Pelosi:

(CNSNews.com) – When CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance–a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill–Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Yeah, people who actually care about the Constitution, and care about the fact that our lawmakers – who take an oath to uphold the Constitution – actually consider it.

Rep. Pete Stark, responding to a question on health care:

Questioner: “If this legislation is constitutional, what limitations are there on the federal government’s ability to tell us how to run our private lives?”

Rep. Stark: “I think that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life. now the basis for that would be how does that affect other people.”

Questioner: “The constitution specially enumerates certain powers to the federal government, and leaves all other authority to the states. The constitution is very limited as to what it can do…. if they can do this, what can’t they do?”

Rep. Stark: “The federal government, yes, can do almost anything in this country.”

Liberal Supreme Court justices imposed abortion on the grounds of a fundamental right to privacy – which is actually nowhere to be found in the Constitution – based on nothing more than “penumbras and emanations” discerned from gazing into the Constitution like a crystal ball rather than like a historical document. Now they are saying there IS no right to privacy of any kind, whatsoever in order to impose government health care and all the violations of rights and liberties that go hand-in-hand with that imposition. Because it never was about the Constitution or even about any right to privacy; it was always about using whatever rhetorical argument they wanted to get the result they wanted. So they said we had a right to privacy until the right to privacy got in their way.

If the federal government can do almost anything in this country, how then do you stop the next dictatorship? How do you stop tyranny? How do you stop totalitarian big government?

And let’s consider a corresponding Democrat’s statement on the same subject of government health care:

“The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re passing legislation that will cover 300 million American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

And, of course, Dingell is right: it takes time and effort to abandon the Constitution – which places limits on federal power – and then impose controls on the people that utterly abandon any scintilla of any meaningful form of constitutional government.

Carnahan: “We’re going to also have a libertarian and a Constitution Party candidate running. And I will tell you no one’s going to know who they are, but it’s not going to matter, because Glenn Beck says you’re supposed to be for the Constitution, and there is some percentage of people who will go vote for them. And in our internal polling about six or seven percent goes like that to the Libertarian and Constitution Party. So I’m quite sure that whoever wins is going to do it with less than fifty percent of the vote.” […]

Donor: “You just don’t sound like those Constitution Party votes are going to come out of your account.”

Carnahan: “What do you think?” (Audience laughter)

Donor: “I think you’re right.” (Audience laughter)

Here’s the Youtube audio of that exchange:

Stop and think about that: it is a matter of mocking derision that no one who actually cares about the integrity of the Constitution is going to vote for the Democrats. And in fact Robin Carnahan – who is serving as a Democrat in the office of Secretary of State – cynically intends to exploit the fact that she can divide those who care about the Constitution and win by attrition.

And they mock the fact that no one who votes Democrat gives a leaping damn about the Constitution.

“Actually, I think really what it was was an effort to get the Tea Partiers to think that they really have some sort of revolutionary plan, because at the beginning they quote a lot from the Constitution, the idea that free people can govern themselves, that the government powers are derived from the consent of the governed.

All that stuff that I think that, that that’s an effort to try to appeal to those people, the Tea Party.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Let’s just go ahead and abolish it so we can have the kind of totalitarian big government that Democrats yearn for. Because Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and all these other leftist dictators were just such groovy people, and we need their ilk here in red, white and blue America.

Yeah, that’s right. Ridicule me, Rep. Schakowsky. Call me a “tenther” like I’m a “birther” or a “truther” or some sort of nutjob because – unlike Democrats – I actually honor our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

“A public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer” – Rep. Jan Schakowsky (to wild applause).

Marxism and communism is not extreme. Nope. It’s not extreme to use ObamaCare as a vehicle to put the private sector out of business so you can sneak in a government-planned economy. What’s “extreme” is believing in the Constitution that Democrats such as Jan Schakowsky once deceitfully swore an oath to uphold.

Democrats spent over a year imposing 2,700 pages of unconstitutional “laws” upon a people who never wanted it. And now, amazingly, they’re demanding that Republicans merely recognize that it’s done and over with, and move on.

Fortunately, Republicans DO care about the Constitution. And they’re going to fight Democrats for the soul of this country.

“The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

When Barack Obama signed this 2,700 page monster into law yesterday, he said, “These reforms won’t give the government more control over your health care.” But that statement is simply untrue; otherwise over 16,000 new IRS agents wouldn’t need to be hired to enforce the mandates, now would they?

The Reid bill could just as easily be called the “Secretary Shall Bill.” It references the “Secretary” 2,185 times and it uses the phrase the “Secretary shall” a shocking 725 times. Each time it is granting a power to whoever is appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services, instead of empowering individuals.

Individual mandates requiring you with the full power of law to purchase health insurance from the Reich’s “approved list” of insurance salesmen. Sixteen thousand new IRS agents to poke through your personal life to make sure you did so. A Secretary of Human Services run amok with all kinds of new powers administered through 159 new federal government bureaucracies.

Democrat Dingell couldn’t have expressed it better: he and his fellow Democrats have labored “to put the legislation together to control the people.”

It’s funny in its own vicious, twisted, psychotic little way. Nancy Pelosi calls American citizens “un-American” and compares them to swastika-toting Nazis as she charges them with being “Astroturf.” And Harry Reid officially added the word “evil mongers” to the English language to describe opponents of the Democrats’ health care agenda.

Who are the real thugs? Democrats attack congressional town hall protesters as “Brown Shirts” — likening taxpayer activists across the country to Hitler’s storm troopers. But it’s the Big Labor hoodlums clad in identical purple shirts — the uniform of Service Employees International Union members — who own the mob label.

Margarida Jorge, a former SEIU organizing director who now serves as national field director for the deep-pocketed, left-wing coalition Health Care for America Now, sent out a memo to her foot soldiers last week on how to counter Obamacare opponents. “You must bring enough people to drown them out and to cover all our bases so as to marginalize their disruptive tactics,” she exhorted.

Local SEIU chapters echoed the call to brass knuckles. “It is critical that our members with real, personal stories about the need for access to quality, affordable care come out in strong numbers to drown out their voices,” urged the leaders of SEIU’s Local 2001 in Connecticut, according to a memo exposed by The Weekly Standard’s Mary Katharine Ham.

At town hall meetings in St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., last week, purple-shirted SEIU members engaged in physical confrontations with critics of the Democrats’ health care takeover plans. Assault victim Kenneth Gladney, beaten while passing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, is turning the tables on his SEIU assailants. The black conservative activist announced Tuesday that he’s filing hate crime charges against the union goons in Missouri.

We’ve got ACORN and SEIU footsoldiers being bussed into town halls far from their own districts by the multiple busloads. The bussed-in people from outside the district got in; the ordinary citizens who live in the politically conservative district and wanted to ask their questions and express their opinions found themselves outside.

The nice thing about Astroturf is you can pick it up when you’re through with it at one event and then haul it away to another one.

Need a job? It turns out being “Astroturf” for blatantly hypocritical Democrats pays. Caleb Howe has an article entitled, “Let’s Talk Astroturf” with all kinds of screen saves offering pay-for-protest. Here’s one of them:

The key, of course, is for Democrats to demonize their opposition while they bring their own demons in. By the busload.

You remember that nice and not at all rude lady, Democrat Houston Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who took a phone call and talked while a woman with cancer was trying to express her concerns about Sheila Jackson Lee’s health care plan?

Somebody pointed out how incredibly rude Sheila was. When she later walked by that person, she hissed, “I am NOT rude. I can multi-task!”

I’ll leave it up to you who is the Astroturf: the health care opponent with cancer trying to ask a question, or the “not rude” representative ignoring her and chatting on her cell phone. My money’s on Sheila Jackson Lee.

But that’s hardly enough to say about Sheila Jackson Lee’s winning ways, or which side of the debate is really doing all the damn “Astroturfing.”

Here’s video of a medical doctor getting up at Sheila J. Lee’s town hall:

On Aug. 11th our own Houston Chronicle displayed a picture of Shelia Jackson Lee hugging a woman who had asked a question at the townhall as well, but her question was in full support of the health care bill. The woman was identified as “Dr. Roxana Mayer, a pediatric primary care physician.” Turns out, she isn’t a doctor at all though. She had identified herself to the Chonicle that way though.

Patterico, a lawyer and LA blogger smelled something fishy, found her on MySpace, saw that she was clearly not a doctor, and e-mailed her to ask her to make sure. She did e-mail back and admit to the lie. It seems she was also an Obama delegate (actually true), which she also told the Chronicle, but the reporter failed to mention that little fact about her.

So, here we have someone asking a question, giving favor in support of the health care bill, posing as a doctor to give more credibility to her support. When in reality she was an Obama delegate and NOT a doctor.

After the plants at Obama’s townhalls, and now this, it’s beyond amusing and ironic that the Democrats accuse the Tea Parties of being “manufactured.”

Yeah, it turns out that “Dr. Roxana Mayer” is “Astroturf” on a level of fraud that even the lying liberals haven’t accused conservatives of being. The Patterico link cited above has the title, “I’m not a doctor but I play one at town hall meetings.” When confronted, Mayer demonstrated nothing but contempt – contempt of the truth.

“Doctor” Roxana Mayer is not just some kook who showed up at a town hall and misrepresented herself. She was chosen as an Obama delegate representing the state of Texas. She is currently a “grass roots organizer” and a lead organizer for “Organizing for America” – which Obama is calling upon to address all the “misinformation” allegedly coming from the other side.

Seriously: Who is the “plant” around here? How truly stupid are we?

Is having a “grass roots organizing” former Obama state delegate pretend to be a doctor in order to fabricate pseudo-credibility not low enough for you? Then I’ve got more. Remember this picture, broadcast all over the mainstream media?

Well, first of all, the mainstream media that is so OUTRAGED by the Obama as Hitler signs didn’t really mind the ones like this that dominated liberal events for the better part of eight years:

When Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and now the president’s own deputy press secretary conjure up images of Nazis at healthcare town halls, they are engaging in one of the oldest tricks in anyone’s book, but an especial favorite of their mentor, Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky himself employed this method, quite deviously. Alinsky biographer, Sanford D. Horwitt provides an anecdote using precisely this same diabolical tactic to deceive the people. From Horwitt’s Let Them Call Me Rebel:

“…in the spring of 1972, at Tulane University…students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations – a speech likely to include a defense of the Nixon administration’s Vietnam War policies. The students told Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address. That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined, not very creative – and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go to hear the speech dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards reading, ‘The KKK supports Bush.’ And that is what they did, with very successful, attention-getting results.”

Planting major falsehoods has been a favorite Alinsky strategy from the start. His acolyte, Barack Obama, learned his Industrial Areas Foundation lessons on deceiving for power while on a side trip during his Harvard years, then taught the Alinsky power tactics at the University of Chicago.

It is almost impossible to believe that, even with near total control of the country, Democrats are resorting to the old myth in portraying themselves as the victim even as they viciously and deceitfully demagogue and demonize increasing numbers of the American people.

But that is precisely what they are doing.

As the left continues to demonize American citizens – many of them elderly – at town hall events, just recognize the source.